Truman (40 page)

The underlying problem throughout, he said, was avarice, “wild greed.”

He saw the country’s unemployment and unrest as the fault of too much concentration of power and population, too much bigness in everything. The country would be better off if 60 percent of all the assets of all insurance companies were not concentrated in four companies. A thousand insurance companies, with $4 million each in assets, would be a thousand times better for the country than the Metropolitan Life, with its $4 billion in assets. Just as a thousand towns of 7,000 people were of more value than one city of 7 million.

The speech was front-page news in
The New York Times
and drew the immediate attention of labor leaders and reform-minded citizens across the country. Nor did anyone in the Senate doubt that he had done his homework. Not even the dullest of hearings seemed to wear him down and some were as dull as any ever recorded at the Capitol. Many times he was the only senator present.

In the eyes of those working with him, he had also shown uncommon courage. Much of the focus had been on the financial finagling behind the bankrupt Missouri Pacific Railroad. Max Lowenthal, a former labor attorney, had written a critical analysis of railroad reorganization,
The Investor Pays.
As an expert on the subject, he warned the senator that the inquiries might produce some “pretty hot stuff,” and that this could be embarrassing for him in Missouri. Truman instructed Lowenthal and the staff to proceed as they would with any other investigation. Pressures on him to call off the hearings, or at least to go easy, did become intense. But there was no letting up, Lowenthal did not think there were a half-dozen others in the Senate who could have withstood the pressure Truman took.

The hearings continued, the senator cross-examining witnesses in a courteous but persistent fashion. Lowenthal would remember that it seemed “an innate part of his personality to be fair and to know what is fair, and to exercise restraint when he possesses great power, particularly the power to investigate…the power to police…. He gave witnesses all the time they wanted.”

Ironically, the senator whose own background had seemed so suspect was gaining a reputation as a skilled investigator.

Though it did not seem of particular importance at the time, Truman was also taking positions on civil rights that appeared to belie his Missouri background. He consistently supported legislation that would abolish the poll tax and prevent lynchings. In 1938, in a Senate battle over an anti-lynching bill, he voted to limit debate on the bill in an unsuccessful effort to break a filibuster against it.

Still more outspoken were his feelings on “preparedness,” national defense. “We must not close our eyes to the possibility of another war,” he warned an American Legion meeting at Larchmont, New York, in 1938, “because conditions in Europe have developed to a point likely to cause an explosion any time.” He called for the establishment of an air force “second to none.” No one could be more mistaken than the isolationists, he said. America had erred gravely by refusing to sign the Versailles Treaty and refusing to join the League of Nations. “We did not accept our responsibility as a world power.” America couldn’t pull back and hide from the world. America was blessed with riches and America wanted peace, but “in the coming struggle between democracy and dictatorship, democracy must be prepared to defend its principles and its wealth.”

The end for Tom Pendergast was drawing near. The once robust, florid Big Boss looked dreadful, gray, drawn, physically diminished, and for all his high style of living he was close to financial ruin as a consequence of his chronic, consuming need to gamble. In one month he lost nearly $75,000 betting on the horses. His new private secretary at 1908 Main Street, Bernard Gnefkow, regularly kept tabs on bets of $5,000 to $20,000 on a single race. Later estimates were that T.J. may have squandered $6 million on the horses. But as would be shown, he had kept these transactions cleverly hidden from friends and family, as well as the government, by using cash only and devising fictitious names to conceal where the money came from and where it went. In the last part of the 1930s he had become so in debt to gamblers and bookmakers around the country as to be virtually in their control. They spoke of him not as “the Big Boss” but “the Big Sucker.” To anyone who knew the story of the Pendergasts and their dynasty this seemed an odd turn of fate, since it was luck at the track that had given them their start, with Alderman Jim and his winnings on the horse called Climax.

Later, in an effort to explain the downfall of Boss Tom, his admirers, including Senator Harry Truman, would insist that he was “not himself,” that failing health and the gambling fever drove him to do things he never would have done in his prime. A Kansas City police officer named John Flavin, a veteran of years on the force, would remember that on the day T.J. gave him his job, he had said, “Don’t ever take any money that doesn’t belong to you and you’ll never have any trouble in life.”

A new federal district attorney for Kansas City had begun investigations, focusing first on vote fraud in the ’36 elections. He was Maurice Milligan, the younger brother of Tuck Milligan, and he, too, was Bennett Clark’s man (Clark had arranged his appointment). But after the ’36 elections Milligan’s chief ally in the assault on Pendergast was Governor Lloyd C. Stark, whose own rise to office owed so much to T.J. and the whole Kansas City organization. Stark had turned on Pendergast as no one ever had—or ever dared try—determined to destroy him once and for all. It was Stark’s conviction that his loyalty belonged to the people, not to any machine or its boss.

The documentation amassed by Milligan and a swarm of FBI agents revealed that approximately 60,000 “ghost” votes had been cast in Kansas City in 1936. Many precincts had registration figures exceeding the known population. Hundreds of defendants were brought to court and, as the
Star
reporter William Reddig noted, what surprised most people from Kansas City, who had heard about election thieves for years, was to find how many of them looked just like ordinary citizens, as indeed most were. The trials, lasting nearly two years, led to 279 convictions, and Milligan, a handsome, pipe-smoking “country lawyer,” became a local hero.

But what would prove the crucial investigation began only after Governor Stark, accompanied by Milligan, went to Washington. Bennett Clark had given Roosevelt the tip that Pendergast had failed to report huge sums of income on his tax returns. Roosevelt notified the Treasury Department and it was then that Treasury investigators started looking into the story of the insurance bribe first described by Marquis Childs in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
in 1935. Before they were finished, Stark and Milligan had five federal agencies at work on special assignment.

They found that an official of the Great American Insurance Companies, Charles Street, had met with Pendergast in a Chicago hotel in January 1935, or just as Senator Truman was trying to learn his way about Capitol Hill. The Chicago meeting had been arranged by R. Emmett O’Malley, Missouri’s Superintendent of Insurance. Charles Street, speaking for some eight different insurance companies, told Pendergast he wanted the settlement by O’Malley’s office of an old issue over fire insurance rates that had kept nearly $10 million impounded. And that of course he was willing to pay for it. When Street offered $200,000, T.J. declined. When Street offered $500,000, T.J. said yes. Later, An the interest of speeding things along, the $500,000 was increased to $750,000.

A first installment of $50,000 in cash was delivered to T.J. personally at his Main Street office on May 9, 1935. An agreement releasing the insurance money was then worked out in a room at the Muehlebach Hotel by Street, O’Malley, and attorneys for the insurance companies, after which further payments on the bribe continued. One delivery to T.J.’s house on Ward Parkway in the spring of 1936 was for a total of $330,000 in cash in a Gladstone bag.

Though none of this was disclosed for some while, Stark fired O’Malley and rumors were rampant. How much or little Senator Truman knew is not recorded. Probably it was very little, in view of how hard he took the news when it broke. But when District Attorney Milligan’s term expired early in 1938 and both Stark and Roosevelt were calling on the Senate to confirm his reappointment, Harry Truman found himself facing the nearly certain prospect of being the lone senator with objections. By senatorial custom, he could have blocked the reappointment simply by saying that Milligan was personally obnoxious to him. This he did not do, however, because Franklin Roosevelt called him on the phone and asked him not to, as a personal favor.

He could also, of course, have had nothing to do with the matter, and remained silent.

Instead, on Tuesday, February 15, 1938, he marched through the swinging doors of the Senate Chamber and delivered a full-scale attack on Milligan, as well as on the federal judges in Kansas City, a scathing, bitter speech that helped his reputation not at all, nor served any purpose other than to release a great deal of pent-up fury and possibly bring Tom Pendergast a measure of satisfaction. Milligan, he said, was Roosevelt’s “personal appointment” and made to appease the “rabidly partisan press.” He called Milligan corrupt, and charged the judges with playing politics, since they had been appointed by Republican Presidents Harding and Coolidge, “I say, Mr. President, that a jackson County, Missouri, Democrat has as much chance of a fair trial in the Federal District Court of Western Missouri as a Jew would have in a Hitler court or a Trotsky follower before Stalin.”

It was the one time he had ever attacked the President, the one time he had ever touched on, let alone defended his political origins in the Senate, and it was his worst moment in the Senate. Again he read from a prepared text. Yet he seemed out of control, grossly overreacting even if some of his points deserved hearing—the refusal of the courts, for example, to let anyone from Jackson County sit on the juries.

“The manner in which the juries were drawn,” remembered a federal district judge in Kansas City years later, “and the fact that only Democrats were indicted in the polling precincts in which the vote fraud occurred, when it was obvious that the Republican judges and clerk of elections in the same precincts were equally guilty, distorted Truman’s view beyond comprehension. He felt he had to blast, and blast he did—to his discredit.”

Possibly, with a more measured, thoughtful defense, he could have taken his audience beyond the stereotypical picture of boss rule. By his own bearing, the decency and common sense that were so much a part of him, he might have encouraged appreciation of the accomplishments of the Kansas City organization that he himself so admired. As it was, he achieved nothing. When the time came to confirm Milligan by vote, he was the lone senator in opposition.

To his credit, it would be said only that he had made a brave gesture of loyalty to an old friend. At least he had not “run for cover.”

So harsh were the expressions of disapproval issued at the White House that Truman began feeling his career was over. He brooded for days. In a confidential letter to a friend, he said that “in view of my speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday and the reaction to it from the White House,” he would not be running for reelection in 1940—though later he would ask for return of the letter.